Moving beyond railway stations in India, Google will soon begin working on its Station project to bring fast Wi-Fi at other public places.

About 150km south-east of Mumbai, the city of Pune will soon become the first place in the world to see Google deploy fast-internet hotspots at public places as part of its Station project, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The move comes as IT giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T), in association with Google, state-run internet service provider RailTel, and IBM form a consortium to bag a Rs 1,500 million ($ 22.2 million) with local authority Pune Smart City Development Corporation to turn Pune into a smart city. Read more…

City officials and the Secret Service have confirmed that just days before the presidential inauguration, police surveillance cameras in Washington, DC were targeted by hackers. Reportedly, 70 percent of the CCTV storage devices were infected with ransomware.

ead of the iPhone SE launch – a handset that is going to appeal to a much wider base than the geekerati of Silicon Valley – Apple has pulled in another celebrity to remind us all what the iPhone can do. But this is no Kenny Chesney promoting Apple Music or Stevie Wonder showing off the VoiceOver feature. Apple has pulled out the biggest gun it could find.

Cloud storage has become the way we store much of our data, but it’s not encrypted. A new solution, Cyptomator, offers an open source solution for cloud storage encryption for your desktop or iOS.

Rather than rely on cloud storage safeguards, Cryptomator encrypts your files before they even reach the cloud. Encrypting files locally means files with sensitive data stored in the cloud can’t be readily accessed if someone were to get to them.

So long as your cloud storage syncs with a local directory — and most popular ones like Google Drive or Dropbox do — Cryptomator will work. It also uses AES encryption with 256-bit key length and keeps encryption client-side so there is never any shared data with an online service.

It’s not a fly-by-night service, either. Cryptomator has been in the works since 2014, and is now ready for prime time. Its developer, Tobias Hagemann, is also hard at work on a version for Android.

The iOS version (iPhone and iPad) is $ 1.99, while the OS X variant of Cryptomator is a ‘pay what you want’ proposition. I’ve been using it for quite some time, and while it creates another layer between your files and cloud storage, it’s a handy tool if you’re serious about keeping your files safe from prying eyes.

We already knew Samsung’s final Gear VR was coming in 2015. Now we have a price and a better sense of the release timing.

The mobile-based virtual reality headset will launch in North America “in time for Black Friday” and worldwide “shortly after,” as Samsung SVP of Technology Strategy Peter Koo revealed when he took the stage at the Oculus Connect keynote on Thursday. It’ll sell for $ 99.

The final build of the Gear VR is 22% lighter than the “Innovator Edition” that first launched in Dec. 2014. It’s also got a revised design that does away with the top head strap and a smarter design for the side-mounted touchpad, with an directional pad-shaped indentation that should make blindly operating the controls more convenient. Read more…